Symantec Vision (ne Veritas Vision), day 1

Today is the first day of Symantec’s Vision end user conference. Last year’s conference was still under the Veritas name, so it was interesting to see how the dynamics have changed since that last one. It is very clear who bought who on this one. I have yet to see any of the traditional Veritas guys take charge. This conference is well put together, but there is just too much to cover. The notes below come from my experience during the few sessions I was able to attend. They are very much stream of consciousness, so disregard any formatting, spelling, or even semantic errors.

Kick-off Keynote

  • Vision is to secure information, compliance, and availability
  • System failures and user failure are as important to consider as natural or externally driven events
  • 130 large scale data breaches last year. most of the “hackers” are gone and are now being replaced by criminal organizations that are more insidious as well as more organized.
  • 15% of gross annual revenues go to R/D
  • focusing more and more on the integration of classic and veritas products
  • messaging is about inbound and outbound traffic
  • managed security software model is being delivered (will move to managed backup and servers)

Futures in Enterprise Vault

  • EV is now part of Enterprise Message Management (Brightmail, IMLogic)
  • Trippled the engineering staff since the KVS acquisition
  • Did not show AXS/One in the forester or Gartner thing
  • 75% of a typical companies IP is in email
  • 75% of fortune 500 litigation involves Discover of Email comm.
  • 79% of companies accept email as confirmation of a transaction
  • Instant messenger traffic is being considered in the same class as email (this is something that AXS/one had a couple of years ago).
  • Movement is towards pro-active compliance management (keeping things in before they go out and vice-versa). Today most things are being handled on an after the fact matter
  • Analytics will be the step after that (who’s talking to whom)
  • Messaging is more than email : email (exchange, notes, smtp) (90% of the problem – but the rest is growing even faster), messaging (IM: Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, MSN, etc), Collaboration (files, web, sharepoint), digital communications (voice mail, voip, etc).
  • VoIP is being considered as archive data
  • blogs?
  • water cooler conversations ( large trade houses are looking at recording common meeting grounds)
  • email as an asset (user value, business value, business history)
  • email as a liability (smoking guns, cost of review)
  • Risk classes: 1) No archiving – high risk, high cost, 2) expire archive after x days, delete too soon?, 3) retain items forever, litigation?, 4) retain records by category, nirvana
  • customer objective, (reduce storage cost, reduce litigation risk, reduce review costs)
  • records management does work because ( email volume, informality, universality)
  • challenges (end user push back to policy, tursing automated systems, can’t go back – no undo on a delete)
  • Archiving needs to be intelligent (itelligent classification, itelligent retention, intellligent management)
  • email encryption? (note: the hands up response from the crowd seemed to show moderate interest in encryption)
  • databases, sap, bloomberg, and ECM are future data sources (IM is done now through the IMlogic acquisition)
  • EV 6.0 sp2 now works with VCS (if email is mission critical, archiving is mission critical!) (later in the year MS cluster server will also work)
  • legal hold utility – (separate utility – pick a DA case, place items on hold, no expiry until lifted, track multiple holds) (requires DA 5 sp4)
  • sharepoint shortcuts (analogue to exchange shortcuts, adds to version archiving in ev6, age driven threshold, click on shortcut to retrieve, restore back to sharepoint)
  • ECM/RM system (enterprise content, records management) API. (user drags “file plan” in ecm outlook plugin to classify item, ECM system now can define retention and metadata, item stays in ev but managed by ECM)
  • ROADMAP
  • July time frame DA 6.0 – (legal hold integrated in DA, federated search across Directories (multiple EV), more flexible boolean search criteria )
  • EO CY 2006 EV 7.0 – (enterprise scale admin : roles based admin, granular policies (move evpn to gui), mscs support, improved backup), best user experience (desktop search integration), advanced reporting, improved supportability
  • ++ (user file share archiving – emc celerra), E-discovery – API to export to third party case management tools(tenex, concordance, etc.), lotus mailbox archiving, simpler exchange install
  • innovation: intelligent archiving – (content based classification, ecm connectors), EMM (tighter IM integration, tighter AV integration, encryption and RMS), file lifecycle mgmt (storage exec (building storage exec into EV!)+ FSA)
  • working to add Mac support! (they are hearing more and more often that the mac is part of the enterprise)
  • 7.0 is going to be a significant upgrade – so plan, plan, plan carefully
  • next gen (7.0+):
  • enhanced single instance storage (block level)
  • xml storage format
  • advanced retention and disposition (e.g. reclassification)
  • microsoft 2007 support (exchange 12, office 12, goal to ga with ms)
  • next gen scalabiliy (enghanced indexing technology), distributed deployments, sacle out model
  • backup and archiving integration (unified search, integrated data capture from exchange)

DataDomain Customer Panel

  • Overriding comment from all of them was “simple to install, simple to use, simple to justify”
  • No surprises as to where it fits (don’t use tape, disk becomes primary recovery tool, tape becomes primary archive tool)
  • Customer perception was skeptical at first, but then turned to “prove it to me”. Very much what we see in the field.

CTO Keynote (Ajei Gopal)

  • Big thing is the open source movement
  • Innovation over the next 10 years is going to go from Ameica/Europe to China/India and will become a global pool of innovation
  • Data is now spread everywhere (from data center to distributed to internet 1.0)
  • Identity information will become key data to prtotect
  • Fraud protection
  • Bill protection
  • Futures:
  • Active policy management framework (policy central console)
  • Business services are unit of measure (application with one or more servers/storage/etc)
  • Has service templates (comes with best practices) (defines SLA’s that map down to backup rules, dr rules, volume rules, etc).
  • Autodiscovers topology of services (servers, san, storage).
  • Based on what things need to be done they will either a) generate automatic actions, b) guide an administrator through a process, or c) generate a ticket to be serviced by one of the team (backup, san, etc.)
  • Monitors applications (like netbackup)) for compliance to policy settings (best practices stuff). Does this on the fly and real time.
  • SDSA (symmantec database security auditor) monitors and manages access and output from a database. operates from a paranoid world.
  • easily monitors for sql injection atacks (learns from user or self learns at first and then monitors after that.)
  • today it is detection mode only, but could be an blocking technology down the road

That’s it for today. More will come tomorrow.

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